Issue VI, Volume X : July 2019

Caitriona O'Reilly - Poetry

Caitriona O'Reilly is from Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland. She was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where shecompleted a Ph.D. on American poetry. She has published two full collections with Bloodaxe Books, The Nowhere Birds (2001) and The Sea Cabinet (2006). A third collection is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books and Wake Forest University Press. She is also a widely-published critic, a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review, and currently serves on the editorial board of Poetry Salzburg Review. She lives in Lincoln, England.

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The Antikythera Mechanism

Too subtle to have been unique, a circular system

of fine-toothed gears in cedar, its wheeled delicate

copper-alloy movement, cranked by a handle, clicks and whirrs

so its incised texts rotate. This year: the colour is black, or

the colour is fire-red. Almost overlooked, dredged

through starless ages by a sponge-diver crippled by the bends,

the sea-bitten glyphs, friable as icing, say that knowledge is dust

almost, but this is the moon in a groove;

no vagabond, but modest and observable in all her pale steps

and lunations. Watching her narrow smile snagged

on the needle tip of the cypress, or floating brokenly

on a sea which admitted darkness but was never blue

must have suggested to him this gleaming planetary gearing,

since to cast bronze is to pray, and to beat metal is to give praise.

There was time in the town-square clepsydra but it trickled away,

he could never enter it again. These were the loved hours:

the poem of the moment, of pouring ripeness, as when the breeze

drove the flame of its exact pattern across the corn.

Wallingford’s astrolabe, Su Song’s Cosmic Engine,

all the beauty of escapements—mercury, grasshopper or deadlock—

even the ticking decay in nine billion caesium cycles

interrogate, like this drowned analect of a mechanical age,

ever more precisely the same silence. Shall I find it?

Shall I become rich? Shall I live an object of envy?

Shall I die in my bed? But nothing, since the nice-fingered craftsmen

of Corinth set the gear-trains to a careful stargazer’s design,

has come close to an answer. Consult the oracle bones,

cast the yarrow stalks, inhale the fine particles of your trade

until they glitter in lung and bone. It is the distant ignition of stars: